My story on the in-house vs. outsourcing high school coaching issue is in the Sunday paper. Read it here[1].

As noted, Dave Logan’s controversial ouster as football coach at Mullen and his hiring at Cherry Creek — are you “hired” when you’re essentially doing it on a volunteer basis? — was the calalyst for the story. But in researching the piece, it quickly became clear to me that there was a bigger issue involved: While most head football coaches in this state still are faculty members, are we soon going to get to the point where that isn’t the case? That would be because of the limited faculty positions available and the inability of administrators to link a coaching position to a faculty opening.

In the space available to me in the paper, I try to address that issue. It is complex and it has not come up overnight. And it goes far beyond the head football coaching job in each school, but on down the line — through the multiple-member football coaching staffs and then the staffs in all the other sports.

Like it or not, coaches increasingly are going to be “outsiders.” There’s no avoiding it. It’s not necessarily a negative if the hires are judicious, and if the coaches added — whether in tennis or field hockey or baseball or anything else — are qualified and are doing it for the right reasons. If they’re doing it for ego, or to add to the reach of their club sport fiefdoms, that’s not a good thing.

The potential positive is if more accomplished men and women step up and answer the call for “outside” coaches, and do it while recognizing that it isn’t “their” program, but the school’s and the community’s. For example, it would be terrific if “outside” coaches with great credentials, both on the sports and personal level, took on the baseball and football jobs currently open at Jefferson High School in Edgewater, a diverse school with struggling athletic programs; or jobs in the DPS.

I’ve been torn by the Logan imbroglio. I’ve made no secret of my respect for him, dating back to when I moved into the Wheat Ridge High district in the middle of my junior year and was told that this (much, much older) fellow named Logan would be my baseball teammate as soon as the basketball season ended. We were Logan & Frei batterymates for that season and I suspect that I still hold a Jefferson County league record — for most passed balls in a season. (In the team picture taken by the legendary “Friendly Photographer” Bill Worthen, reprised here, Dave is the tall guy in the back row and I am one of the short guys on one knee.) We also were teammates in Legion ball that summer before Dave went off to CU and I remained at WRHS for another year.

What has me torn is that I in theory agree with the new Mullen administration’s position, although I suspect there were additional hidden agendas at work. Absolutely, in a perfect world, the head high school football coach in every building should be a faculty member. Yes, high school football coaches can be that influential in young men’s lives.

My father was a head coach in the Pacific 8 Conference and then an assistant coach and administrator in the NFL, yet one of the most emotional nights I’ve ever spent with him was when I attended a 40th reunion of Grant High School’s Oregon state championship team with him in Portland — where as a just-out-of-school World War II veteran with a drawer of medals he never told me about, he was young assistant coach in his first job. My God, these silver-haired or bald players weren’t much younger than he was, and they still were calling him “Coach” and “Mr. Frei” and saying how influential he and the late Ted Ogdahl, the head coach who had earned the Silver Star on Okinawa, were to them. (I realized how important those players still were to my father, too.) Over the years, I’ve been reminded that it also was the case with my father’s other high school teams, too, regardless of their win-loss records.

OK, that’s off the track, but I know how important and influential high school coaches can be. You might think that’s corny, but my suspicion is that most reading this prep-specific blog “get” what I’m talking about.

But among the many realities tied to the point that high school coaches still should be in the classrooms and hallways are:

a) Dave Logan was, and will continue to be, as involved or more involved in the daily school fabric as most high school coaches. As I alluded to in the story, he has earned the right to be considered exceptional. The Mullen administration either didn’t get that or was disingenuous because of unadmitted motivations.

b) Creating marginal-at-best faculty positions for football coaches, which was done so often in the past, is an insulting sham we no longer can afford or even stand for in this climate of limited resources in education — especially in public schools. And,

c) The world ain’t perfect anymore in the sense that public schools especially will have to go outside more often for coaches in the future.

Here are additional points and information that didn’t make the story.

— I mentioned that many Denver Public Schools coaches teach at other schools in the district, and not at the schools where they coach. One example: East High head coach Ron McFarland, a former star nose tackle at Iowa State, teaches at Castro Elementary in southwest Denver and then has to journey to East for practice.

— Here’s CHSAA commissioner Paul Angelico’s stand: “A coach is not a person who’s there for two hours a day during practice. A coach is, I don’t want to say a parent, but a mentor and role model, and absolutely, that should be all day.”

— Jefferson High assistant principal and athletic director George White is quoted in the story about those aforementioned football and baseball coaching openings, but here’s something else he said: “I need to fill this position because they’ll start stuff here within the next month and we don’t have any teaching positions open right away. We can’t just create one. There are no openings. They’re letting teachers go more than they’re hiring teachers. When teachers retire, they’re not filling those positions . . . At Jefferson High School, we would love to have a football coach in the building.”

— An additional comment from Jefferson County Schools athletic director Jim Thyfault: “The principals, partially because of budget cuts, no longer have the ability to say, ‘Well, we need a football coach, let’s go create a PE job.’ They’re monitored on the number of teachers they have in the building, based on their number of students.”

Thyfault himself was a head basketball coach at Standley Lake as an “outsider” before leaving the business world and getting a teaching certification, so he’s seen both sides. “I just think it’s so important for the coaches to have that contact with kids during the day,” he said “They’re able to see them in school, see them away from the sport itself, and maybe in a social setting more than a school setting.

“But on the other hand, I was someone who in my first six years as a varsity basketball coach, I was not a teacher. I was in the private business world. I was a proponent of that other point of view, that it can be done. But if you’re not going to be in the building as a head coach, I think it’s important that you have at least one of your top assistants in the building. I think if you don’t have a coach or an assistant in the building, you can just create challenges.”

— Jamie Woodruff, 60, is retired from teaching, and only last week, he returned to the head-coaching job at Parker’s Ponderosa High School – the same position he held from 1993-2006. He helped out as the school’s defensive coordinator in 2009-10, and now he’s back in the head job. At this point, he’s an “outside” coach, but he hopes to change that.

“I’m trying to get in there to at least teach a class,” he said. “We don’t have any choice at our school. When you’re coaching, sometimes talent can cover up some flaws in the system. To me, my concern is what happens to kids when they leave the program. I’d rather be with them for 48 hours a day than two hours a day. That’s what I believe.”